The People of the Black Circle
of the alleyway. Khemsa flicked the spear aside with his left hand, as a
man might flick a straw, and his right flashed out and back, seeming
gently to caress the warrior's neck in passing. And the guard pitched on
his face without a sound, his head lolling on a broken neck.
Khemsa did not glance at him, but went straight to one of the arched
doors and placed his open hand against the heavy bronze lock. With a
rending shudder the portal buckled inward. As the girl followed him
through, she saw that the thick teakwood hung in splinters, the bronze
bolts were bent and twisted from their sockets, and the great hinges
broken and disjointed. A thousand-pound battering-ram with forty men to
swing it could have shattered the barrier no more completely. Khemsa was
drunk with freedom and the exercise of his power, glorying in his might
and flinging his strength about as a young giant exercises his thews
with unnecessary vigor in the exultant pride of his prowess.
The broken door let them into a small courtyard, lit by a cresset.
Opposite the door was a wide grille of iron bars. A hairy hand was
visible, gripping one of these bars, and in the darkness behind them
glimmered the whites of eyes.
Khemsa stood silent for a space, gazing into the shadows from which
those glimmering eyes gave back his stare with burning intensity. Then
his hand went into his robe and came out again, and from his opening
fingers a shimmering feather of sparkling dust sifted to the flags.
Instantly a flare of green fire lighted the enclosure. In the brief
glare the forms of seven men, standing motionless behind the bars, were
limned in vivid detail; tall, hairy men in ragged hill-men's garments.
They did not speak, but in their eyes blazed the fear of death, and
their hairy fingers gripped the bars.
The fire died out but the glow remained, a quivering ball of lambent
green that pulsed and shimmered on the flags before Khemsa's feet. The
wide gaze of the tribesmen was fixed upon it. It wavered, elongated; it
turned into a luminous greensmoke spiraling upward. It twisted and
writhed like a great shadowy serpent, then broadened and billowed out in
shining folds and whirls. It grew to a cloud moving silently over the
flags--straight toward the grille. The men watched its coming with
dilated eyes; the bars quivered with the grip of their desperate
fingers. Bearded lips parted but no sound came forth. The green cloud
rolled on the bars and blotted them from sight; like a fog it oozed
through the grille and hid the men within. From the enveloping folds
came a strangled gasp, as of a man plunged suddenly under the surface of
water. That was all.
Khemsa touched the girl's arm, as she stood with parted lips and dilated
eyes. Mechanically she turned away with him, looking back over her
shoulder. Already the mist was thinning; close to the bars she saw a
pair of sandalled feet, the toes turned upward--she glimpsed the
indistinct outlines of seven still, prostrate shapes.
'And now for a steed swifter than the fastest horse ever bred in a
mortal stable,' Khemsa was saying. 'We will be in Afghulistan before
dawn.'
4 An Encounter in the Pass
Yasmina Devi could never clearly remember the details of her abduction.
The unexpectedness and violence stunned her; she had only a confused
impression of a whirl of happenings--the terrifying grip of a mighty
arm, the blazing eyes of her abductor, and his hot breath burning on
her flesh. The leap through the window to the parapet, the mad race
across battlements and roofs when the fear of falling froze her, the
reckless descent of a rope bound to a merlon--he went down almost at a
run, his captive folded limply over his brawny shoulder--all this was a
befuddled tangle in the Devi's mind. She retained a more vivid memory of
him running fleetly into the shadows of the trees, carrying her like a
child, and vaulting into the saddle of a fierce Bhalkhana stallion which
reared and snorted. Then there was a sensation of flying, and the racing
hoofs were striking sparks of fire from the flinty road as the stallion
swept up the slopes.
As the girl's mind cleared, her first sensations were furious rage and
shame. She was appalled. The rulers of the golden kingdoms south of the
Himelians were considered little short of divine; and she was the Devi
of Vendhya! Fright was submerged in regal wrath. She cried out furiously
and began struggling. She, Yasmina, to be carried on the saddle-bow of a
hill chief, like a common wench of the market-place! He merely hardened
his massive thews slightly against her writhings, and for the first time
in her life she experienced the coercion of superior physical strength.
His arms felt like iron about her slender limbs. He glanced down at her
and grinned hugely. His teeth glimmered whitely in the starlight. The
reins lay loose on the stallion's flowing mane, and every thew and fiber
of the great beast strained as he hurtled along the boulder-strewn
trail. But Conan sat easily, almost carelessly, in the saddle, riding
like a centaur.
'You hill-bred dog!' she panted, quivering with the impact of shame,
anger, and the realization of helplessness. 'You dare--you _dare_! Your
life shall pay for this! Where are you taking me?'
'To the villages of Afghulistan,' he answered, casting a glance over his
shoulder.
Behind them, beyond the slopes they had traversed, torches were tossing
on the walls of the fortress, and he glimpsed a flare of light that
meant the great gate had been opened. And he laughed, a deep-throated
boom gusty as the hill wind.
'The governor has sent his riders after us,' he laughed. 'By Crom, we
will lead him a merry chase! What do you think, Devi--will they pay
seven lives for a Kshatriya princess?'
'They will send an army to hang you and your spawn of devils,' she
promised him with conviction.
He laughed gustily and shifted her to a more comfortable position in his
arms. But she took this as a fresh outrage, and renewed her vain
struggle, until she saw that her efforts were only amusing him. Besides,
her light silken garments, floating on the wind, were being outrageously
disarranged by her struggles. She concluded that a scornful submission
was the better part of dignity, and lapsed into a smoldering quiescence.
She felt even her anger being submerged by awe as they entered the mouth
of the Pass, lowering like a black well mouth in the blacker walls that
rose like colossal ramparts to bar their way. It was as if a gigantic
knife had cut the Zhaibar out of walls of solid rock. On either hand
sheer slopes pitched up for thousands of feet, and the mouth of the Pass
was dark as hate. Even Conan could not see with any accuracy, but he
knew the road, even by night. And knowing that armed men were racing
through the starlight after him, he did not check the stallion's speed.
The great brute was not yet showing fatigue. He thundered along the road
that followed the valley bed, labored up a slope, swept along a low
ridge where treacherous shale on either hand lurked for the unwary, and
came upon a trail that followed the lap of the left-hand wall.
Not even Conan could spy, in that darkness, an ambush set by Zhaibar
tribesmen. As they swept past the black mouth of a gorge that opened
into the Pass, a javelin swished through the air and thudded home behind
the stallion's straining shoulder. The great beast let out his life in a
shuddering sob and stumbled, going headlong in mid-stride. But Conan had
recognized the flight and stroke of the javelin, and he acted with
spring-steel quickness.
As the horse fell he leaped clear, holding the girl aloft to guard her
from striking boulders. He lit on his feet like a cat, thrust her into a
cleft of rock, and wheeled toward the outer darkness, drawing his knife.
Yasmina, confused by the rapidity of events, not quite sure just what
had happened, saw a vague shape rush out of the darkness, bare feet
slapping softly on the rock, ragged garments whipping on the wind of his
haste. She glimpsed the flicker of steel, heard the lightning crack of
stroke, parry and counter-stroke, and the crunch of bone as Conan's long
knife split the other's skull.
Conan sprang back, crouching in the shelter of the rocks. Out in the
night men were moving and a stentorian voice roared: 'What, you dogs! Do
you flinch? In, curse you, and take them!'
Conan started, peered into the darkness and lifted his voice.
'Yar Afzal! Is it you?'
There sounded a startled imprecation, and the voice called warily.
'Conan? Is it you, Conan?'
'Aye!' the Cimmerian laughed. 'Come forth, you old war-dog. I've slain
one of your men.'
There was movement among the rocks, a light flared dimly, and then a
flame appeared and came bobbing toward him, and as it approached, a
fierce bearded countenance grew out of the darkness. The man who carried
it held it high, thrust forward, and craned his neck to peer among the
boulders it lighted; the other hand gripped a great curved tulwar. Conan
stepped forward, sheathing his knife, and the other roared a greeting.
'Aye, it is Conan! Come out of your rocks, dogs! It is Conan!'
Others pressed into the wavering circle of light--wild, ragged, bearded
men, with eyes like wolves, and long blades in their fists. They did not
see Yasmina, for she was hidden by Conan's massive body. But peeping
from her covert, she knew icy fear for the first time that night. These
men were more like wolves than human beings.
'What are you hunting in the Zhaibar by night, Yar Afzal?' Conan
demanded of the burly chief, who grinned like a bearded ghoul.
'Who knows what might come up the Pass after dark? We Wazulis are
night-hawks. But what of you, Conan?'
'I have a prisoner,' answered the Cimmerian. And moving aside he
disclosed the cowering girl. Reaching a long arm into the crevice he
drew her trembling forth.
Her imperious bearing was gone. She stared timidly at the ring of
bearded faces that hemmed her in, and was grateful for the strong arm
that clasped her possessively. The torch was thrust close to her, and
there was a sucking intake of breath about the ring.
'She is my captive,' Conan warned, glancing pointedly at the feet of the
man he had slain, just visible within the ring of light. 'I was taking
her to Afghulistan, but now you have slain my horse, and the Kshatriyas
are close behind me.'
'Come with us to my village,' suggested Yar Afzal. 'We have horses
hidden in the gorge. They can never follow us in the darkness. They are
close behind you, you say?'
'So close that I hear now the clink of their hoofs on the flint,'
answered Conan grimly.
Instantly there was movement; the torch was dashed out and the ragged
shapes melted like phantoms into the darkness. Conan swept up the Devi
in his arms, and she did not resist. The rocky ground hurt her slim feet
in their soft slippers and she felt very small and helpless in that
brutish, primordial blackness among those colossal, nighted crags.
Feeling her shiver in the wind that moaned down the defiles, Conan
jerked a ragged cloak from its owner's shoulders and wrapped it about
her. He also hissed a warning in her ear, ordering her to make no sound.
She did not hear the distant clink of shod hoofs on rock that warned the
keen-eared hill-men; but she was far too frightened to disobey, in any
event.
She could see nothing but a few faint stars far above, but she knew by
the deepening darkness when they entered the gorge mouth. There was a
stir about them, the uneasy movement of horses. A few muttered words,
and Conan mounted the horse of the man he had killed, lifting the girl
up in front of him. Like phantoms except for the click of their hoofs,
the band swept away up the shadowy gorge. Behind them on the trail they